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Part of becoming a minister is participating in a multi-day psychological evaluation. You talk about your hopes, your dreams, your childhood, your interests . . . and you take a battery of tests.

Truly, you take a huge number of tests, generally beforehand, some proctored. And one of those is the MMPI, which you then discuss with a licensed psychologist, generally the person who has interpreted your scores.

Taking that test is itself an interesting experience- it has an incredible number of questions, all forced choice, asking you to respond to statements like “I like to start fires” (no) “Door hinges fascinate me” (what ?) and “I sometimes imagine punching people in the face” (let’s be honest, yes . . . that said, have never actually done so).

My results were pretty unremarkable; clinically speaking, I am just not that interesting. Some suspicion of vested authority typical of Unitarian Universalist applicants; a bit of “maybe you’re TRYING to look good” typical of the helping professions.

“Really nothing to see here,” observed the psychologist. “Any questions?”

Yes, actually, I did have one: What is this elevation under “mania?” What does that even mean?

“Ah,” said the psychologist, in a manner very much befitting a psychologist.

“That is one piece we look at to assess whether someone might exhibit the kind of cycling we refer to as bipolar disorder. As you can see, you do not have a corresponding elevation in the depression area.”

O . . .k?

“So, when we see this, and it doesn’t look like a tendency toward bipolar, the next thing that we look at is your personality profile: where is this person on the extroversion scale?

You test as a pretty strong extrovert, and it sounds like that fits with your own understanding?”

Yes.

“Well, we tend to talk about extroversion as if it is primarily about orientation toward other people, but it might be more helpful to think of it as an orientation to the world. Extroversion is a sensory-seeking orientation. It’s the way your brain responds to stimulus, and how it tends to seek it. Extroverts seek stimulation externally, and that can show up on some tests as manic behavior. That’s why we compare.”

Huh. So, then, what’s ‘manic behavior?‘

“Probably the things you think of as the spice of life. Do you get involved in lots of activities, or just a few? Does your calendar always have blank space in it, or do you tend to keep yourself busy? Do you concentrate your conversations in one or a few partners, or mainly inside your own head, or are you in constant dialogue with numerous people and on a variety of topics?”

Ah.

“Right. All of that is sensory-seeking behavior. It’s your way of experiencing the world. And when it’s not a clinical indicator that something is amiss, it seems to correspond with where people fall on the extroversion scale.”

—

This was fascinating, but I didn’t give much further thought to it, either then or in the years since. I haven’t had a reason to. I was busy, you know, with the aforementioned variety of activities, multitude of conversation partners, travel to all manner of different places—a veritable banquet of busyness, by which I mean outside stimulation.

And it’s been frustrating not only to be cut off from those pieces of life that feed me and that FEEL me—the pieces that give me access to the somatic data that keep me in touch with my own feelings, often not at first but refracted and returned to me through the experience of passing through the world first, like satellite signals—but to live amid so little understanding of how connected this is with my sense of what it is to LIVE.

I feel for extroverts right now, not just because this experience itself has been difficult, but because people around us do NOT understand that it’s not just being in the company of people that we miss. It’s being part of the hum and bustle of the larger world.

It’s novelty and new horizons and new inputs of ideas, thoughts that we synthesize in our own minds after experiencing pieces of them outside of ourselves.

And speaking of synthesis, it’s not that we’re never quiet. In what I have come to think of as “regular life”—B.C.V.—on my best days, I spent literally hours by myself, alone with my thoughts and my writing, processing ideas and reflections. It’s not all input. It’s just that for extrovert creatives, external input is a key piece of the loop that looks like input—synthesis—output.

Don’t get me wrong; I not only care deeply for introverts (I am married to an introvert, at least one of my two children is a strong introvert, and my mother, my only sibling, all but one of my mentors in ministry and most of my cadre of close friends land on the introvert side of the scale as well), but I may just understand more deeply how much the B.C.V. modern world was not set up to accommodate them.

In short, introverts, I heard you before. And I get it more now, and I am hopeful that this experience can help us all to find more flexibility in leaning toward what feeds us.

And. We are not back to that world yet, are contemplating, in fact, the possibility of another year of this in one form or another.

And some of your friends, some of your kids, some of the people you love do not have coronavirus and nevertheless feel like it’s somewhat hard to breathe in the small spaces that our lives have been reduced to.

I want you to have some empathy for that. And if these are people who are, say, too young to be able to define most pieces of their lives or even to fully articulate what they need to feel alive in the world, I want you to help them in the best ways that you can. Though they may be driving your quiet self nuts (and the truth is, getting real about what’s happening for them just might help).

I don’t have any magic solutions, at least not yet. But simply attending more to the yearnings of my body and spirit, and to the orientation of my personality, has been helpful. And so have a couple of small strategies, which I offer, and look forward to receiving yours in return.

First, I am leaning into depth connection in my relationships. I think we assume that this is the exclusive domain of introverts, but it isn’t—I have the same deep conversations you do, just probably with a few more people. There are some pieces that can help with this, one of which I have shared before and which is just about building sustaining friendships in general (basically, be reasonably reliable, show up as your real self, be willing to risk some vulnerability, and don’t assume that for a friendship to be real, it has to hold all of you, nor that any one relationship is ever going to meet all of your needs). This helps because input is input–it doesn’t have to come from everywhere, as long as it’s meaningfully coming from somewhere. My friendships, and all that they bring with them, they help me to survive and to thrive, even now.

And second, I am being intentional about expanding my turf. I try to see something new with my eyes every single day. Sometimes this literally means a different horizon—I have been taking some very, very long walks (spouse: where are we going NOW? Can we go home?)—and other times it means, as trite as it sounds, committing to more deeply see the spaces closer to home. And sometimes, fellow externally-oriented sensors, it might mean getting in your damn car and actually driving somewhere.

This was news to me, a suggestion from a fellow extrovert as I lifted up some of the above and bemoaned the suffocation overlaid atop what for us has mostly been a remarkable domestic tranquility. “Drive somewhere,” she said. “Where!?!” I responded incredulously. “We can’t GO anywhere.” And then my friend, who lives on the outskirts of Boston, explained that she had gotten in her car, rolled down the windows, turned up the radio, and let the wind blow through her hair as she drove into the city, and around it, and then back home again.

“And you didn’t stop?,” I asked, still mystified. What, after all, was the point then? “No, and I honestly didn’t need to. It was enough, somehow, just to see things I hadn’t seen, and to look at people who don’t live in my house, and to feel alive in different space.”

This still seemed wack, but lacking a better suggestion, I tried it, and guess what? She’s right.

So, I drove. I drove to a trailhead; once I ran, and once I just admired the sunset and then turned myself lazily back toward home. I drove to a neighboring county and picked up the seedlings a colleague left for me on her porch. I drove to the Rhode Island state line and back, and I would have kept right on driving had I not feared arrest (Gov. Raimondo, you are a zealous woman).

I drove, and I saw, and I remembered what it’s like to feel more fully alive. I remembered that I am a person of the open road. I remembered that for me exhilaration feels a lot like hope.

And all of this is informing our family choices right now. I am high risk, and we are taking this situation very seriously. But I also believe in quality of life, and I weigh it heavily. Perhaps we will find creative and community building ways to respond if we can acknowledge that being safe is not the only thing that people live for.

After three months in seclusion, we are spending a week in Vermont soon, and hearing this, a friend asked me what I thought it would be like, and what I was looking forward to.

I thought for a moment. And I realized that the truth is that I have no idea what it will be like. I don’t know what to expect. That part feels like a blank, and maybe we’ll end up back at home after only a day or two; that definitely seems possible.

But I do know what I am looking forward to; it’s a thing I can feel, a prickle of excitement, a resonance that runs head to toe.

I am looking forward to taking the onramp that leads to the highway, wheels on pavement, familiarity behind me, the future, unknown, opening as a landscape before me.

I’m on the road for our faith quite a bit, and I say yes to home hospitality any time I can. It’s a pretty safe bet, when your shared business is the church, and while it’s often interesting . . . and occasionally interesting, what happens most often is that we make a quick heart connection.

They share a bit of their lives, their hopes, their family pride and their existential struggle, over coffee and whatever is for breakfast. And then, somehow, we keep in touch. These people have come to visit me, I’ve made return visits back to them, and I got to serve, years later, as a seminary reference for one who finally decided to follow her call.

And occasionally, these people share more with me than breakfast, as happened once this past year.

They are gardeners, this couple. I had arrived in near darkness, after a late dinner the evening before, and they wanted to make sure I saw the backyard. Time was short, we all knew, but I agreed, stepping with my host through the sliding door . . . into a world of roses. There were so many, and in their full glory, and in the background, the sound of water—a fountain he had engineered to run the entire length of the yard. I wandered, smelled, smiled. And then he said, “This isn’t what I wanted to show you.” The property continued as we walked, rambling across the valley floor, past a woodshop and then into a long and carefully laid out vegetable garden, planter box after planter box of strawberries and squash, cucumbers and climbing beans.

I grew up with two sets of gardening grandparents. I know both how to snap a pea, and how to appreciate the miracle of it. A well-loved garden brings me back to those days, and to them, and I stood, smiling, as my host pressed peas into my hand. He walked a bit farther, and then turned back to me, swept his hand across the landscape and back toward the house, and asked, “What do you see?” I considered that question, answerable in so many ways, and finally turned in silence back to him, awaiting the answer. “That,” he said, pointing toward his home, “is just a house.

But this [sweeping his hand across the land]—this is home.”

I nodded, considering.

“I went to war, and came back, and had to decide what I would be. I didn’t have roots; I had to make them. We made them here. We put down roots, and we made this our home.”

Then he reached down to one of the spiny, spindly green plants in the box near his feet. “These. These are weeds, they’ll grow anywhere. They’re prehistoric, older than anything out here. And they put down a taproot so fast and so deep that you can’t get rid of them. You can pull them off easily at the top, but they’ll grow back. They know how to root.”

He handed me the spiky plant, and turned again to look at me.

“Find a place to root. Make a home. Do it by finding some land and getting to know it. Doesn’t matter where. Choose.”

He gestured to the plant in my hand, then. “You don’t have to take that with you. But think about it.”

And then we walked back to the house, me wiping surprised tears from my cheeks as I went.

Think about it.

And I did. I thought, first, about what on earth in our short conversations had led us to this moment. Had I signaled with my words? With something deep in my being? Was this just a moment of synergy or even mere happenstance, something another visitor would have dismissed as an odd spell of passion from an 80 year old farmer, but which for me, echoed clear to the bone?

I let go of those questions as we eventually do all unknowable things, but I have held on to the exhortation that inspired them. “Find a place to root. Make a home.”

And here’s a hard thing: I do not know if that instruction is compatible with parish ministry.

How do you find a place to root when you serve at the will of a people? How do you make a home in a place where you are other, and every house and rock and history belongs to someone else?

How do you find a place to attach and deepen, when you must always be willing to act in negation of any meaningful sense of home–must be ready to cut ties, leave, and not return?

Is it that I’m missing the key to understanding how this works?

Or is it that I have apprehended correctly that “home” of the land and place-rooted sort is not on offer in this life? That this man was talking to people after his own heart, and that ministers, mostly, are of a different genus, that of third-culture people of every stripe, kin to all who belong simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, those air plants who root in shared legacy and exist in the eternal now?

I have thought about this as a colleague and friend confessed her decade of heartache and loneliness, how she has become bereft of ever finding a partner while serving in a small town.

I have thought about this as another colleague, approaching retirement, grew teary as he recounted the journey across settlements, across communities, and the legacy it has left in his own life that nowhere is home and no one is waiting for his return.

I have thought about it as my husband and I have wondered whether and where to find a home where we are, something with land, a neighborhood, a possibility of greater rootedness for children who are not made of air.

What that man did or did not know was that I have been thinking of it always.

This is the cost we do not speak of, the calculation none of us quite knows how to make.

And in the meantime, newer ministers choose not to consider the parish, some not because they are not called to church, but because they are not called to leave.

In the meantime, seasoned colleagues address their peers to share the story of their ministry, their odyssey (that title itself ironic, as one friend recently pointed out, given that the Odyssey itself is basically a long tale of trying and failing to be home) . . . and then leave storied careers to spend a fifth season unsure of where they belong.

Is there a home, upon this earth, for those of us who serve the spirit?

Is there a place, in our movement, for this conversation?

As climate and communities and churches continue to change, what will a place-based ministry look like?

How can you, and particularly as a minister, audaciously claim THAT word in the name of public faith?

I claim it because some things are indeed sacred, starting with being able to worship and learn and celebrate without fear of being shot to death in a nation in which the SOCIAL CONTRACT is currently BURNING in the halls of power.

I claim it because we know that faith means the power to bless, and we forget that we wield the equally important responsibility to curse: that which opposes the inherent worth and dignity of human life; that which steals hope; that which opposes, in short, the calling of God.

I claim it because this ongoing carnage is against my religion.

And so, you’re right. We should have a conversation about acceptable dialogue in the public square.

Here is how this is gonna go:

If you are more concerned about my saying the eff word—no, fuck that. If you are more concerned about my saying ‘fuck,’ and by concerned I mean moved to say something to me about it, than you are inspired to action by the slaughter of six and sixteen and sixty year olds who are doing things like going to kindergarten and attending a concert and, you know, praying, and by inspired to action I mean that you are actively saying something to power about it, then you are part of the problem.

Ouch, right? Those are fighting words. Fuck, and You are part of the problem: two things we don’t have the stomach for in upper middle class white America.

I am so sorry to have to tell you that your baby/husband/wife/father didn’t make it, though, said to a thousand someones you don’t know and maybe a couple you do: that for some reason does not make us physically ill at this moment.

But it should, you guys. It really, really should.

And so I’m starting this post with fuck and also writing it a lot of fucking times right in the fucking middle because I would like us to notice what it feels like to be uncomfortable.

What it costs.

Where we feel it.

The thing is, friends, I used to think that there would come a moment when the balance would tip and more of us would know what some of us know—

That you are not safe, not anywhere, not ever, from mass casualty gun violence

That you are safe from your neighbors, even the ones who are different from you

That an incredible amount of money is invested each year to oppose and obfuscate those two realities so that you ignore the first and are terrified of the latter

That more guns only add to the reality of the first proposition.

… I used to think that then, in that tipping point, the larger We that lies at the core of American-style democracy, or that did, or that survives in our dreams, that this collective force would begin to assert itself, spontaneously and passionately. That WE would begin to act purposefully and effectively.

Friends, I don’t think that anymore, and here are the two reasons why:

First, because comfort is the ultimate slot-machine payout of privilege.

Not worrying about X or Y or Z . . . indeed, not thinking about it at all, which necessarily precludes discussing it or the drag of hearing about it on Facebook or considering underlying themes (unless rendered harmless and third-person as fodder for the book group, addressed in two-hour increments, merlot in hand)—this elysian existence is the ultimate grand prize of “making it.”

And talking about gun violence is fucking uncomfortable as hell. It’s uncomfortable because it makes people sad. It’s uncomfortable because people are going to disagree. It’s uncomfortable because your uncle Joe and that one guy from high school are going to act as corporate shills of the NRA, because the NRA pays fucking millions every year to ensure that the right and privilege here is defending their coffers and calling it “freedom.”

It’s uncomfortable because the reality is that at this moment in this country you might fucking die in any goddamned random public place, or in a private place if your misogynistic loved one also has a gun, and who wants to think about that?

Comfort, my peeps, is both the dream we chase and the slow narcotic drip that we use to justify all the not-seeing. And as its beneficiaries, we are loathe to contemplate, much less voluntarily enter into, the discomfort that we imagine to be the permanent price of challenging the status quo that got us here.

So that’s a problem.

It’s a big fucking problem.

And it’s not the only thing that’s troubling me.

Because the second problem is that actions are reflexive, which might seem hopeful in that we could move quickly at any point, but it isn’t, because it actually means that we are likely to move only in the ways that we can easily manage under stress:

What we ourselves have previously practiced

what we’ve seen modeled

What is rooted in the fundamental reflexes of our reptilian brains

That’s it. When push comes to shove, that’s what we’re working with.

And it’s fucking not enough.

I want you to practice something different.

For me, yes, and for our democracy, by which I mean not fucking consumer capitalism, but the social contract in which I still have so much hope. I want you to practice differently for your fucking children, and I want you to practice differently for mine.

I want you to imagine a day when I can hold fucking worship without half an eye on the fucking door because I am responsible in that hour not just for your immortal souls BUT FOR ALL OF YOUR GODDAMNED LIVES.

And so, I have created a handy practice guide. I was going to make it 100 things but I thought that might be a little fucking overwhelming. Then I thought of three, but then you might think you have to do them all at the same fucking time. And that’s not what I’m saying.

What we are going for instead is simply a movement toward something OTHER THAN THIS FUCKING INSANITY. From each one of us. The isolation and then the flexing and eventually the building and strengthening of OUR MUSCLES OF COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE.

Here, my friends, are FIVE fucking things that even you can do to end the fucking slaughter in our fucking public spaces:

Call your local elected representatives one time per week and tell them you are for fucking gun control.

Call your state elected representatives one time per week and tell them that you don’t care about the NRA Scorecard because you are for fucking gun control.

Say fuck this on social media and explain to your circle of influence that you are for fucking gun control.

The next time your uncle Joe or that random guy from high school shuts down a conversation about how we can fucking move on this issue, TELL YOURSELF that their perspective is a fucking hack. Which it is. Maintain hope. Maintain Hope. Maintain hope.

LEVEL UP NINJA MOVE: The next time your uncle Joe or that random guy from high school shuts down a conversation about how we can fucking move on this issue, name the thing that they are doing as PEDDLING IN HOPELESSNESS AT THE EXPENSE OF LIVES and say fuck that. Know that while you do this, you are modeling courage and showing his and your public that we will not allow the conversation to be stopped with this inanity.

I have friends, and “friends,” and followers- some intentional and some who I strongly suspect just got lost. It’s a place where I speak the words that are on my heart, or I share the words of others, and people respond.

Pretty simple, right? My Facebook works like yours does?

This feels net-neutral, no pun intended, most of the time. FB is a container, holding the good and the bad. And the things it holds include the transcendent and the funny and the nearly magical and the appalling and the annoying and, occasionally, the tragic.

I’m an external processor, and have been writing for an audience for my entire literate life. I share real stuff, and I hear often that it matters to people. Thank you for what you said. For what you shared. For what you wrote.

I myself found beauty and hope, connectedness and pieces of information that I need to survive in this moment and in whatever this era may be, on Facebook just this morning. It’s where so much of the good stuff lives.

And yet we have a problem, Facebook and I. And I don’t know how to solve it.

Can I have an online ministry, the question goes, and hold onto something that feels like myself?

My people, I do not know.

This year I have done some things I’ve never tried before, in the pursuit of balance. I’ve begun to filter content, and to use the “block” feature selectively. I think I used to feel, in an unexamined way, that cutting anyone off was against my religion. Then I realized that self-care is also part of my faith, and that you don’t get to be intimately involved in my life just because you want to be. That discovery been uneventful and surprisingly great, and so has this other thing: taking one-week breaks once a quarter and disabling my Facebook account entirely. Literally disappearing, and having it disappear from my life. It sounds scorched-earth, and in the moment I first tried it, I think it probably was– and yet, I’ve found it restorative and astonishingly easy, and the weird thing is, I don’t miss FB.

Truly. Not right away, and not later either; it’s more like waking up from having been hypnotized than taking a vacation away from beloved people and things. In fact, I have discovered that I always dread coming back.

But I do miss you, many of you, and I miss conversation and I also miss sharing what’s happening in my world. And then there’s the reality that FB feels fairly necessary for my work in the world, even the “real life” and brick and mortar pieces of that life–the online threads run deep.

And yet I still haven’t found a way to go halves on Facebook.

I need a workable middle rather than a freefall off the addiction cliff, and I’ll be honest: I’m no longer sure that such a space exists, at least not for someone like me, or for the work I do here.

This realization reminds me of a cartoon I once saw—on Facebook, of course– about the experience of shopping at Target.

Like, how a person would reasonably expect that excursion to go, and what happens to your brain and hands and wallet instead.

I sign on because I just need to do this one thing. It’s usually something specific and work related; a question about worship or a response about pastoral care- a task on my to-do list that I intend to cross off by logging on.

And then twenty minutes later I sign off, and it’s in that second, staring at the login screen, that I realize that I didn’t do that one thing. I suddenly realize, in fact, that I haven’t even thought about that thing from the moment that the virtual-world-a-la-Zuckerberg, the one with the urgent red numerals and the picture-filled news feed, first opened before me.

My people, I have repeated this cycle—identify task; log on to complete it; log out and suddenly remember what task, still uncompleted, was– as many as three times. Consecutively.

This makes me worry about my brain.

And I feel certain that it’s not accidental. Facebook now hijacks our brains because it’s good at doing that, and it’s good at it because a policy decision was made somewhere along the line to become effective hijackers of our daily lives.

And friends, I know that “hijack” is a strong word. I’m using it intentionally, and in the brain science way; this post is not, at least not yet, to say that I am having a theological born-again moment, or renouncing technology altogether and resolving to pastor in a more traditionally-pastoral way.

But as Facebook, so goes life. The thing is, Can’t turn it off, can’t look away feels like a pretty good synopsis of my first year ministry experience—the real-life portion– and I know something about this deep in my bones: it’s unsustainable.

Having a public persona on Facebook, or probably anywhere, makes some pretty big asks. Accordingly, I’ve had many conversations about authenticity with colleagues and leaders over the past few years. What to reveal, and how real do we keep things, and how do we hold ourselves or move in the face of the relentless projections of ministry and the pastor/congregant relationship.

Often we speak of these things normatively, as if there is an “answer” to be had, when the reality is that there is simply a spectrum of options. Increased and decreased transparency. Greater and lesser self-awareness. More and less consistency of contact with our own internal touchstones and our larger value systems. Times to be very vocal and times to fall largely silent.

These are things each minister must consider in her public work, and my Facebook meta-conversation is no exception. What is driving me to distraction, however, has turned out to be none of this.

It is instead distraction itself: the loss and sorrow and ultimate opportunity cost of fractured attention.

And again, it’s not just Facebook. FB has become what it is because our society is what it is, our lives are what they are, our willingness and need to be constantly other-occupied lies where it does.

And maybe that’s not your story; a lot of people seem to make life online and offline cohere.

But my reality isn’t this simple. I find Facebook addictive, and I also feel sure that this is deliberate. And that in my case, this addiction- its processes and its inputs and deliverables– it fits right into all the fractured spaces of a larger and equally-frenetic lifestyle.

And in the meantime, I have these kids.

Ren is wise beyond his years, savvy, wry and well-read. And he is also dealing with emergent Aspergers, working on social skills and where his body is in space and figuring out how to love and flourish as who he is while meeting others where they are. It’s a big job, and while he doesn’t want to hold my hand, he appreciates my standing close.

Si, meanwhile, is a tornado of boy energy, sharp and focused, exquisitely sensitive, quick to snuggle and equally quick to seek retribution when all is not right in his kingdom. He used to beg me to color with him. I think I did that once, while composing in my head most of an essay about how hard that was. The next year, this past one, struggling for roots himself in a vastly different landscape, he pleaded for plants. I promised to take him after school, on the weekend, sometime soon. I never did; the pots sit empty in our garage.

Now my younger son wants to build, wants me to watch and learn and copilot. And I discovered that I am so used to saying no to my child that I had to find not just time but unused muscles, unaccessed vocabularies, to say yes.

I am a work in progress.

But untenable is not too strong a word for this lack of attending.

Fortunately, these two have other loving adults in their lives, the ones who were present when first teeth fell out and each boy learned to ride a bike and they celebrated three consecutive birthdays, all without me present. (Literally; I was away at seminary in every single one of those cases. Three years. An irreplaceable chunk of two childhoods.)

The kids are alright, but I might not be.

The costs, these days, are more than I’m willing to pay. And so, this is the year that we lurch our way into something else. And it has begun with this summer because when you realize that something really isn’t working, the reasonable thing is to stop doing that thing, and to try something else.

The thing is, I’m hearing a call again these days.

It’s to come home.

Because you know what (and this is magical): it’s not too late not to miss it.

So this is me, figuring this out, and who knows how it’s going to look. Maybe there’s a middle space as yet undiscovered. Maybe it’s called Facebook-with-limits, or maybe it’s that we begin to meet each other somewhere else.

But I do know, in the meantime, where my own middle space is going to be.

Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons is the senior minister of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Kansas City, Missouri

Good afternoon, Fairhaven, and friends from all over. We meet today to formalize and celebrate leadership in our Unitarian Universalist movement, amidst some political turmoil within the leadership of our association. Issues around racial injustice in this country have commanded our attention as religious liberals since our founding, and we have yet to resolve the tension between the culture of privilege that we inherit, from which many of us benefit and some of us suffer, and the call to justice, equity, and compassion that is never entirely silent at the core of our faith. Today we find ourselves again in pain over a hiring decision made by good people with good intentions, that has nevertheless served to perpetuate disenfranchisement and systemic power imbalances among us. The president of our association has resigned from office for the remaining three months of his term. No one knows for sure exactly what it would mean to get this right for once. Nevertheless, this is in fact no time for any of us to despair, and despair is the opposite of leadership.

Rather, this is a time not only to face into both our individual and our collective pain, but in fact to be thankful that there is enough capacity among us – even if just barely – for that pain to be recognized by those who carry it and articulated into a space of potential trust, and heard and taken seriously in locations of power. I am inclined to think that the transformation of our institutional structures that we all long for — even as we struggle with our resistance to meaningful change – will not happen just because forces of privilege become willing to undergo the discomfort of hearing about the pain that people of color experience. We won’t get there unless that happens, but it’s not enough. I think we have to be willing to incarnate pain in our institutional experience, and walk through it together, if we are going to learn to actually behave differently. As we used to say in seminary, “Oh, great; another friggin’ growth opportunity!” And yet, without those opportunities, as disorienting and difficult and demanding as they are, we are condemned never to move beyond the limitations and injustices of the past. Choosing to recognize and face into pain is one of the key manifestations of genuine leadership, and it is at the core of what we are gathered here to affirm.

An installation like this shares with a wedding the same dynamic of joyful connection and hope-filled promises for the future; a covenant of fidelity and support, intended to sustain the adventure of mutual discovery and joint accomplishment. It is wonderful; a high moment of human intention to be sure; deserving of celebration. And yet, like a wedding, these high hopes and noble promises can only have their end in some form of sadness. It can be sudden and dramatic tragedy — the minister dies unexpectedly, leaving the congregation heart-broken and grieving. Overwhelming conflict comes to a head by ousting the minister, leaving bitterness and anger. It can be a slow, debilitating erosion of integrity or interest — the people stop coming, the minister stops caring. It can be nobody’s fault — the local employer closes shop, and demographics doom the congregation. It can be spectacular moral failure — the minister seduces a member of the church, or the treasurer embezzles the endowment and refuses to pay the minister. Even in the very best case scenario — the minister enters a well-planned and well-funded retirement after years of loyal and skillful work — both the congregation and the minister will still experience a period of poignant loss, confusion, and sorrow. The longer and more successful the ministry, the more painful that eventual separation. It’s the same with weddings; the story only ends either with one spouse grieving the loss of the other, or else with both grieving for the loss of the love that had once brought them joy together.

There is no fixing this; it’s inherent in the proposition to begin with. The sustenance of the particular connections that give shape and meaning to our lives is always balanced by the grief that comes with losing that bond, either to mortality or entropy. As Robert Frost says, “However it is in some other world, I know that this is the way in ours.” As long as we are creatures in a world of matter and energy, we know at some level that everything is temporary. There are people who look to religion for an exception to this law, for some eternal truth or unfailing love that endures when all else dissolves, and that is indeed what many faith traditions promise. My own life-long religious humanism takes a different approach. It seems to me that faith is not about the search for something that never fails, but rather the affirmation that the experience made possible through connection, relationship, and community is worth the pain of inevitable loss.

I cannot prove this proposition, of course. If you were to say to me, “I have been there, and the pain of bereavement, or betrayal, is far greater than any joy I ever found,” I would not argue with you — only you can know the dimensions of your own griefs and gladnesses. What I can do — what we all do, I suspect, in this strange vocation of ministry — is testify. I can tell you the stories of those who have given themselves to love and to covenant, and been so enriched that they would do it again and again, despite knowing that heartache is part of the bargain. I can bear witness out of my own life in leadership that ‘success’ is a kind of seductive phantom, ever in search of more; it is rather the shared effort, the working together itself, that satisfies both in the moment and in memory. If you really want to build community, take on a demanding project together, and don’t let yourself quit when the going gets tough. Whether or not you accomplish the goal, you will be known to each other, and changed by each other, in the process, and that is the foundation of authentic community.

It’s the ‘don’t let yourself quit when the going gets tough’ proviso that is the reason for all this hoopla over stuff like installations. It will be silly, and humiliating, six months from now, for either Jordinn or the members of this congregation to turn around and say, “Oh, never mind; this is harder than we thought!” This is why our communities of memory and promise are founded upon covenants; because we all need a defense against the impulse of immediate feelings that challenge our best intentions. It is necessary to be reminded from time to time of what you said you were going to do, and what you really want, over and above the lure of momentary comfort. There is more to covenant than just noticing when our interests happen to coincide: “You want to try being a minister? Oh, good; we are looking for someone to organize and entertain us. Let’s do this!” Now I’m not saying that the bureaucratically organized ministerial search process in the UUA is so perfect that calls don’t sometimes come about for such trivial reasons; but what I know is that if ministry works, it has to grow into something deeper and more challenging and at times more aggravating on both sides, than this. In fact, in this setting, it is hard not to be reminded of Shel Silverstein’s cautionary verse:

Have you heard of tiny Melinda Mae,

Who ate a monstrous whale?

She thought she could,

She said she would,

So she started in right at the tail.

And everyone said, “You’re much too small,”

But that didn’t bother Melinda at all.

She took little bites and she chewed very slow,

Just like a good girl should…

…And in eighty-nine years she ate that whale,

Because she said she would!

I find this particularly apt given Jordinn’s well-known affinity for sea food!

Now, I do not mean to suggest that every misguided decision must always be pursued to the bitter end, nor that any ministry, however fruitful, ought to endure for eighty-nine years, certainly, but I do think there is a word to be offered on behalf of that which we do ‘because we said we would.’ That word is covenant; it is our solemn promises that counteract the randomness of a future in which anything and everything is possible, by committing us in advance to certain relationships and values that we have selected as references points for our unfolding journeys. We do this in the knowledge aforethought that there will be both ultimate losses, and incidental difficulties along the way. We do it because what we build with intention, and even with difficulty, is more satisfying in the long run than the pleasures that we happen to encounter randomly wandering around. We do it in these time-consuming, somewhat anachronistic rituals — like weddings, and installation services — invoking powers that we scarcely know how to name, and only partly believe, because we are seeking some way to give our lives the density, and dignity, and depth that we suspect, with longing, might yet be possible for us to access.

The conservative columnist David Brooks, a perceptive if crotchety observer of progressive culture, once described the paradox of liberal institutionalism as the attempt to ‘build a house of obligation upon a foundation of choice.’ I think he had an accurate point, with specific application to Unitarian Universalism and its insistent basis in covenant. We tend to reject family legacy, cultural convention, or the dogmas of tradition as constraints in the project of framing either our specific individual lives or the social structures we must share. We want to make our own commitments of conscience out of an essential freedom; we want to choose our duties and assent to the responsibilities for which we will be held accountable — not because some external force of history or divinity assigned them to us, but like Melinda Mae, because we said we would. Rather like a long-co-habiting bride, Jordinn’s ministry here is already well underway — what, if anything, changes today? I suggest that what changes is that you, the congregation, and she, are about to try to name, and call into being by naming, that ‘because we said we would’ that will bind you both to a shared future, despite the certainty of grief which that future holds. This is an act of faith, on both sides, and let no one tell you otherwise.

It matters that we do this, in both private and collective life, even though there is no escape from eventual loss, because it is precisely what we enact together in the meantime that gives sacred significance to our days. If we are faithful to the purpose of church, it seems to me that there are two necessarily uncompleted projects in which we are always engaged, and these are the challenges on the ground of which authentic community arises. The first is to take David Brooks at his word, and demonstrate what it looks like to indeed build a house of obligation upon a foundation of choice. What does an institution that incarnates the values of Unitarian Universalism look like on the hoof? When the curious and the spiritually hungry come to these doors, will they see people relating to each other and to the rest of the world as our seven principles would suggest? If all someone did was to observe your congregation in action, what would they assume the essence of our faith to be? As I experience it, that essence and those values are counter-cultural; at our best, we are a subversive organization, challenging a success and power idolizing society, bearing witness to the possibility of more compassionate, liberating, and humble human community. We do this most effectively, if not most often, by exemplifying such relationships, amidst the all the challenges of life in a voluntary organization. The effort to be the world we want to see is exhilarating, once we get past the trap of constantly judging and blaming each other. That’s one project to work on together.

The other never ending adventure we share is our own spiritual growth, into the people each of us wants to become. Many and various are the forces which urge us at every moment to take stock of what we have, and whether we are satisfied with that, but where in the course of our daily lives might we be held accountable for what we are, or what growth we are striving for? Who asks us to step into spiritual maturity, to aspire to be grown ups, to identify the qualities that would make our lives worthy of honor, emulation, and blessing? From what I see, if the church is not a place for this, it doesn’t happen anywhere — and this brings us back to covenant. Because there is nothing gained by trying to apply my aspirations for personal growth to you; rather, my role as a partner in religious community is to hold up the mirror of accountability to what you said you wanted to be; to bear witness to your achievements and failures and continuing efforts to give your life the shape you most deeply believe it ought to have. We can share insight and inspiration on this journey, but no one else can do the work of spiritual growth on your behalf — that is not the minister’s job, not even one as talented and passionate and beloved as Jordinn is destined to become. Besides, she has her own inner life to cultivate, with the added challenge of making it transparent enough to serve as an inviting model and summons for all of you. But in the end, religious community that is founded in freedom of conscience and diversity of expression can only hold together because we said we would; it can only keep us as accountable as we make ourselves in covenant, to one another and the challenges we have chosen to take on together.

Today, my friends, we bear witness as you and Jordinn make explicit your stepping into that covenant with one another. We bring to this moment our full awareness that struggles and parting, as well as joys and fulfillment, lie ahead. We bring the testimony of our own past experiences, as well as the centuries of our heritage, affirming the promise that religious community offers, is well worth the price that it demands. With all the hope and wisdom at our disposal, we bless your future together, and lift up your example to our movement and to the world. May you grow together, and sustain each other; may you find the community that is not self-serving, but other-serving and justice-serving, and in the process, become the greater selves that you have shown each other, in courage and faithfulness, all because today, in this place, in this joyful, poignant moment, you said you would.

Rev. Jordinn Nelson Long is the newly installed minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Fairhaven, MA

I spent much of this week in a city I deeply love, which is also a place with which I am in the process of becoming something else. “Visitor” doesn’t quite get there, and “stranger” never will . . . but I’m learning the balancing act of living in, and loving, two places, while in some cases un-living and perhaps even un-loving.

It’s tough, and I’m doing it unevenly, unequally, and sometimes ungracefully. And I’m persuaded that there’s no other way; we create and negotiate relationship, and do change rather than cut-off, by feeling our way through. It’s a challenging thing for humans to straddle the canyons dividing “I” from “thou,” “this” from “that,”; “here” from “there” while maintaining a sense of balance and selfhood.

We simply move forward in trust, and hope that our mistakes might be small and not harmful.

I could write a lot of words about that, simply from a personal perspective. But what occurred to me on this particular visit is that in some way, we’re all here together. Not in Kansas City, of course, though I’m sure the visitor’s bureau would love that.

I mean that we are ALL strangers living in a strange land right now, trying to maintain communion with what is important and beautiful from “before” even as we reach and lean and lurch our way toward an as-yet unknown “after.”

And meanwhile, we live in neither of those places—we instead exist in a “now” that is present, but undefinable. And in this landscape, it’s hard to know how to balance the ordinariness of life—the tasks, the priorities, the conversations–with the urgent call to push back against what is changing. And let’s be clear: what’s happening in our nation is not just change—it’s rupture. Breakage. It’s a negation of much of what has come before, including values. Including lives.

How do we continue to weave with the threads of “any given Friday” when we know that in the background, damage is being done?

How do we go on, having arrived at a place in which it is normal to eat a four dollar cupcake while reading entertainment on one’s phone, and where it is simultaneously only reasonable to be screaming in the streets and demanding change and answers in the halls of power.

If there are answers to be had to these questions, they will come through our wrestling with and bridging two realities, in those moments when we find ourselves standing atop a widening canyon, a foot on both sides. And we will do the real work of keeping our balance, first and finally, in the ways we always have: through art—word, image, song, act—, through religion (in churches and before the altars of our own hearts), and through human encounter.

And I thus think it’s not only relevant, but perhaps imperative, to tell you that in Kansas City, right this minute, it is possible to physically weave yourself between the threads of a very old song. Janet Cardiff’s “Motet” at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is exploration of public space, of art and musical harmony, of closeness to one another and to God, of sacred music and the secular curation of culture.

And not unlike custom cupcakes and all varieties of screaming in the streets, it is a product of our social and spiritual hunger.

Though removed in time, space, and cultural context, the song is powerful. Listeners lean in. They pause, and then linger. They close their eyes. Some cry.

And meanwhile, we do the same, trying to understand what is becoming of our nation.

Writing for NPR, Alva Noë reveals his discomfort with public religion and performance art, both, asserting that “There [is] actually something creepy about [Motet]. A room full of robotlike speakers going proxy for absent singers . . . and a museum or gallery is not a sacred space. There was something almost chilling about the performance of such a spiritual offering in such a secular context.”

This same week for Breitbart, Daniel Nussbaum asserted that the National Endowment for the Arts “has become a controversial agency over time . . . [because] taxpayers should not have to fund art they consider to be against their values, or obscene.”

And simultaneously, writing for the Church of the Larger Fellowship, and for Unitarian Universalism as a movement, Rev. Meg Riley said of covenant: “I wake up in the morning feeling discouraged by the news of the day before…entire pieces of government being eliminated with no sense that anything of value will be lost; many people I know and love scared for their very lives with the new “health care plan,” news media that focuses on the ins and outs of party politics as if that is what I care most about, rather than focusing on how we are to be together and take care of one another in this time. So our theme of the month, covenant, feels more and more relevant to me . . . [because it means] that we are all responsible to and for one another; that no one is free when others are oppressed.”

We cannot, in short, be separated from one another. Cause cannot be separated from effect. And none of us can be cut off from the context from which we hail—not really. We are a people who cross borders all our lives, in our hearts if not with our very bodies.

And this is precisely the thing. “Motet” is powerful because it isn’t separated from context. It is in fact not divorced from anything that has come before—because it cannot be.

And this, wandering through a place that used to be my home but no longer is, is a revelation I can use.

Janet Cardiff’s exposition on infinite loop lays a song in our laps, parsed to be intimately accessible at the same time that it builds and crescendos to something that cannot be held by walls. It has the audacity to be both right-sized for our ears and much too big to keep or categorize.

And this, friends, is not what religion has finally been brought to by secular culture. It is, instead, precisely what we’re all achieving together, in the best moments: a faith that meets us where we are, in the confusion and fragility and human scale of “now,” which then carries us, soaring and together, into something more.

“Motet” is a recognition of all the history we have held, and it’s a simultaneous assurance for the next leg of a journey. That the ancient song continues even amid displacement, that God may be found amid technological advances, that manna falls even amid changing invitations and varying hungers, and is here for us. still

Not unlike our covenants with one another.

That dusty word–covenant–speaks of the promises that return us to one another, and to ourselves. The kind that are so strong that they can be redeemed even when broken. The kind that allow us to straddle, sure of balance, the canyon between “here” and “there.”

In covenant, in “Motet,” in Kansas City: we tread familiar paths equipped with different tools, find ourselves returned to the start of all our wanderings and seeing the place with new eyes, and. know in deeper ways than we were able to before.

Sacred song in secular space is not a break. It’s a return.

And here is its promise as best I know it:

What has come before is not gone. It is here with us, here for us, still. Here for the asking, for the hearing, for the singing.

This is what a sacred motet in a heartland museum can mean. It is what the institution of church, keeping the songs of the people for millennia, can mean. It is every cathedral with its sermon in stones, every poem, every protest, every hymn trying to name God by tugging the vibrating violin strings of our hearts.

In two days, “Motet” will close. The song will once again fall silent.

Yesterday, one of my kids threw a rock at the other one. Both are fine; it was one of those brotherly “accidentally-on-purpose” things, and fortunately didn’t even leave a mark. And believe you me, there were consequences.

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But there are also consequences for all of us–consequences that are not isolated to my family, however much you would like to pretend they are, and which are part and parcel of the political and theological position in which we find ourselves.

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It doesn’t matter that the bigger one threw the rock, in the end, because the altercation began when the little one explained that the small collection of rocks underneath his tree was his “arsenal” against his “enemies.” Scene: a pocket park in a gated planned community. Enemies: a distant gathering of three same-sized children.

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My kids are 6 and 9. They were born Unitarian Universalists, and have spent time in Montessori education, arts-based preschool, homeschooling.

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I am a minister.

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And friends, it saddens and frightens me to report that we as a family are having a hard time overcoming the culture in which our children are being raised.

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As I sat on a park bench, and then at home, with first one and then the other child, explaining that we live in a peaceful place, do not have enemies, and do not need weapons, I realized that there is something that we desperately do need: other stories to tell our children. Other stories with which to raise our boys.

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My husband and I both played with legos constantly as kids. Guess how many of our sets came with guns?

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I’ll let you reflect on your own childhood. How many molded plastic Lego guns? Ever?

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Right.

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In my six year old’s short childhood, which has involved thousands and thousands of Lego bricks, I have involuntarily amassed an arsenal that could arm the revolution. It could. My kids now just bring them and set them on my dresser as soon as they open the box. I find tiny revolvers on my nightstand, miniature semiautomatics on my make up counter.

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Friends, every package marketed to boys comes with weaponry of some sort, often with a remarkable variety of firearms. It is incredibly difficult to find large sets without them. Go look. I’ll wait.

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Now consider the movies with which our children are raised. The shows. The games.

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Now consider the narrative.

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The story.

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The only story that this contemporary moment is willing to teach my sons:

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Everything interesting that could possibly happen involves the potential or actuality of a physical fight. The entire game is preparing for one or defending against it or, better still, prevailing within it.

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We literally have no script for the story where there is peace.

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Peace, in our little boys’ games, is simply the space between skirmishes.

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When it should–and truly, I promise you, it could– be all that they know.

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What have we given them to even imagine this? What script, what story, are we illustrating and encouraging, for the world in which they are actually growing up?

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One which admittedly features more weapons than any generation in living memory– but not because we need them, have needed them, or (God forbid) will need them. No, it is because of this stupid story- “Life is one long fight to the top, composed of other, smaller fights, because this is what we do with and for resources.” It’s a story that sells, and it has crowded out so many other stories of childhood– the nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and also the stories we found and dreamed and created as we roamed neighborhoods, caught frogs, climbed dirt piles, watched ponds.

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And yeah, on those dirt piles, we sometimes played King of the Mountain.

We sometimes pushed each other. We sometimes played the game called war.

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And then somebody got a bloody nose, and somebody cried, and all of us learned that some games aren’t really games, and that there’s an edge beyond which danger lies . . . an edge beyond which none of us want to push.

Is that what my kids were trying to learn, yesterday?

Maybe. Maybe they were, and maybe they would have gotten it with their eyes still intact, without intervention.

But maybe we’ve given them too much of another story to be able to pull it back.

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How long has this reality been in the works? What forces– what power, what money, what desire for control, what fight for a cultural narrative– lie behind it? How do we quit the military-industrial complex ourselves while we simultaneously train our children to be part of it?

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How will we find something else?

And how will we (all) pay if we don’t?

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I wish I didn’t wonder these things. But I do.

And I think the questions, and this moment, have been a long time coming.

Wow, it’s been a few years. More than that, actually—time flies, right? We don’t keep in touch, and even though we lived and worked less than 30 miles from each other for the last six years, I haven’t seen you. We don’t send birthday greetings. I don’t know that I even understood you to be part of my village.

Until now. By which I mean last week, when you sent me that message, and invoked the “friend” card.

Don’t worry; you’re not alone. I know this story. It happens every now and again.

While we lack anything that might be taken for a relationship, we have a friendship, and you’re invoking it now to let me know I have put it on the line.

For being out of touch?

For not knowing your kids’ names?

For forgetting your birthday?

Nope.

For talking about racism.

See, we can go a long time without talking, but there are some things friends just don’t do. And I need to know that. So you’re telling me.

Here’s the post that crossed that friend line:

“If you voted for Trump, and are also “not a racist,” this might be an important thing for you to read. And reflect on. And speak out about.

If this sort of thing is ok with you, well, you’re entitled to your prejudices. And also: we have a word for them.

“I know I am a sensitive person, but when I see that in the title of your post you mention things like “not a racist”, I really feel bothered. Things aren’t always so black and white. I do think it’s possible to identify more with one party- even while not completely loving your candidate- and not be generalized as a racist. I did read [the article about Sessions] and am intrigued by the choice.

I am worried about President Elect Trump and his choices, however I am hoping and praying too and giving him my hope and optimism. I really am trying to be inclusive and forgiving and allowing people a chance, even if they’ve said and done things that they shouldn’t have. . . . “

You go on to remind me to be tolerant, and, above all, that you are not a racist.

Dear Facebook friend.

Here are some things I value:

Civil discourse

Dialogue, and the magic I have sometimes found in the midst of it

Learning

Relationships

But we are not having a leveled conversation here.

And aside from the things listed above—things that I actually do value—you’re making a strong implicit ask for me to prioritize a couple of things that I do not, in fact, value:

“Friendships” with people I’m not really friends with.

Dialogue about two things (potential of hurt feelings; potential of persecution, harassment, and unequal treatment based on skin color) that are categorically, exponentially different, carried on with “pretend like all concerns are equal” as a ground rule.

“Be nice*” as the fundamental edict of white womanhood.

And friend, there’s also something here about honor. About respectability as a white woman. About what we believe, but mostly do not say, about “decency” and “playing by The Rules.”

It’s been impossible not to notice—in fact, I think this is one of the great and unwelcome shocks to upper middle class white America during these last few years—that “don’t be racist” is no longer a rule. It is my experience that it was a rule, at least out loud, for more than a generation and a half. But it’s clearly not a rule now.

And yet, don’t be mean to other white women is TOTALLY a rule. Also: don’t talk about hard stuff. Don’t say what you’re thinking or wondering or worrying about, unless it happens to be birthday party décor. Don’t you dare—ever— say something that might indirectly call anyone to account.

Sister, you’re intrigued?

And you’re asking me to be silent in the face of that?

I am not going to play nice with your casual racism, just because the world we have inherited says that “play nice” is in the honor code, and “check your freaking white privilege” is not.

My reality as a minister in a progressive, anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and multiculturalist faith tradition is that I’m standing atop a widening chasm in maintaining my various relationships. And I’m not sure how much longer I can do it.

I am no longer sure how to occupy space where I give the same amount of energy—more energy, honestly—to dialoguing about your “a little hurt” feelings than to being physically present with those who are afraid for their marriage rights, for their trans child’s ability to use the bathroom without being beaten or intimidated or psychologically and physically brutalized, for their humanity, for their lives.

I can’t play by white girl rules anymore. They make real conversation, and underneath that, real movement, impossible.

And I don’t think that’s an accident. I don’t think my complicity with your comfort is value-neutral.

Thus, as to your implicit threats and explicit invitations: I’m trying to imagine the person you think I might be, the one you’re trying to pull me toward becoming.

I don’t think she’s someone I could live with.

And so, when it turns out I can’t bridge the gap anymore, I will have to make a move. And the truth is, my choice is already made.

If being in relationship with you means preserving your comfort, keeping your thoughts pure and your cheeks tear-stain free … if to be “friends,” I must choose silence, over and against solidarity with people whose concerns have never been about comfort—who are acting in a hierarchy of needs that doesn’t get past the physical and psychological safety pieces–

Friend, I choose them.

I choose my humanity.

I choose my soul.

Sound stark? Feel problematic for your sense of hope, or your understanding of, yes, the magic power of dialogue?

It is. That’s why it’s taken me this long to say this thing, even to myself. It violates every “nice girl” norm I know.

But there is indeed an alternative. And it looks like you doing some work—to get courageous rather than comfortable. It looks like you living in flexible, contested space for awhile.

Truly, you want to stay in relationship? Or establish something deeper? Or simply read my FB public ministry and not feel personally affronted in considering my words to the world?

That would look like you not expecting me to choose silence as a package deal with “friendship.”

Can you do that? Are you inclined to?

I don’t know.

What I’m sure of: no one will make you.

And that, friend, is what we call privilege.

j

*to those who have social value. Obvs.

**I’m going, now, to humanize this person. I’m doing it because humanity and complexity are the deepest call of my faith, and I truly believe that we gain nothing—in any conception of “We” worth having—without that generous willingness. But before I do that, I want to ask you for a favor. All of you. Every single person reading this.

Take a moment, and consider who we are not willing to humanize in our narratives. To whom do we not offer this gift—this sacred responsibility belonging not to the people we choose to talk about, but to ourselves, as story-tellers? Who are “thugs” in our narratives, rather than sons, scholars, dads, grads, promise, potential, our future? Who are “illegal,” in your story, instead of brilliant daughters, future doctors, terrorized toddlers, and the many-centuried hope not just of American shores, but the hope of our nation itself?

I will show you the fuller humanity of this white woman, because we all deserve it. But remember this: we all deserve it. And the next time you want someone to look upon you positively in your own story, I invite you to work twice as hard to reframe your internal narrative about someone else. Especially when it’s challenging. You’ll know you’re on the right track when you surprise yourself.

So: this open letter is part of a real exchange, with a real person. I don’t know if we’re friends now, or if we will be in the future. I do know that she’s stayed in dialogue as our conversation has continued beyond this point. I know that she’s been courageous and willing to listen. I know that she’s working hard to open her heart and hear other, larger stories—and that we can receive that as a gift, because although it is a bullshit way to allocate resources, privilege is real, and it makes willingness optional. Call-in helps. So does a willingness to answer when called.

In short, “White girl from Kansas” just might be more impressive than you give her credit for. May that possibility mean something when it matters.

You are to be congratulated for your courage, if nothing else, in thus affording me yet one more opportunity to offer you instruction, just in case all my prior efforts now appear to me to have borne insufficient fruit. Particularly in a context that precludes you from contesting either the accuracy of my observations or the wisdom of my insights. On your head be it!

[Editor’s note- this blog is so handy for contestations of all sorts . . . . 😉 ]

I hold it a great honor to be invited to recall you, and us, from the elevation of this occasion, with all its festive trappings and warmth of affection for you as a friend, colleague, and blossoming minister, to consider the deeply serious nature of today’s undertaking.

Even though such gatherings as these are indeed, as our colleague Mark Belletini describes them, “high play,” they are not all fun and games. What we have just done, with your assent, is to lay upon you a mark, a burden, and a gift. It is my task to see to it that the mark is indelible, the burden is well grasped, and the gift is seen to be precious and sacred.

By designating you an ordained minister in the living tradition of the free church, we have marked you out as a person worthy of trust and authority. We have invited our fellow Unitarian Universalists in particular, and the world in general, to look to you for institutional leadership, personal integrity, and a compassionate presence.

You are no longer a merely private person, but a public, living witness to the claims of this faith, and to the duties of the vocation that you and I now share. How you conduct your life, no less than what you preach and teach, reflects upon the credibility of this movement, and this profession. Today that mark may seem to you, and to all of us, a joyful honor, but the time will come when you will find it irksome to be endlessly on display as a model of the demanding values we espouse, and you will understand why this is a matter of solemn vows.

I charge you to remember the love and trust in which we bestowed this office upon you, and to fulfill the covenant you have made in the name of all that is holy.

I know that you understand the burden of ministry, to be present to the distress of the world without panic, or denial, or becoming indifferent and numb. People will bring you the pain of their losses and despair, their failures and finitudes, their broken hearts and broken dreams, hoping that you can help them to find courage and strength to keep believing in the possibility of new life.

You will see the dysfunction of relationships and institutions, as well as the injustices and tragedies of the world, and yearn to give healing. Inevitably, you will be profoundly aware of your own limitations, and feel inadequate to these demands, for in truth, you are.

We all are.

You cannot fix, or save, the world; you cannot fix or save another person. All you can do, all any of us can do, is to bring that pain and despair into a place of compassionate attention and truthful witness, which is where all healing starts.

The power of transformation lies not in your intelligence or resourcefulness, but in the creative energy of the universe, which is always and everywhere present, though we are so often blind to it. You must not try to absorb into your own heart the distress that you meet with in others; you must – believe me, now; I know you know this; you must – have a practice that enables you to ground that anxiety and sorrow in the larger life of all that is, in God, by whatever name you may know it.

That is your task — to be the one who is not made helpless by the awareness of all the hurt in the world; who knows where to go for sustenance; who can stand in the presence of oppression and fear and heartache and let it run through you to an ultimate, infinite source where it can do no harm. I charge you to have a vibrant, enduring relationship with that source, which will allow you to remember that you are not god; you, and your work, are a strand in the web, not the web, nor yet the weaver.

Of course, none of us would undertake these formidable duties if the calling of ministry were not also a priceless gift.

You have been summoned to live as if everything you do matters, and to stand with your fellow human beings in the most significant, sacred, and – to give an over-used phrase its actual meaning – truly awesome moments of their lives. You are expected to ponder the deepest questions of the human condition, and people will await your conclusions eagerly, hoping to find guidance for their own perplexities.

All that is most tender and precious in the unfolding of our common experience you are meant to share, and celebrate, and give voice. I promise you, if you will live it out faithfully, there is no more fully human existence than the vocation of ministry. I charge you to rejoice in the privilege of this office, to embrace its generous opportunities for creativity and community, for meaning and service and on going spiritual growth.

We have marked you out for service; remember to be the servant not of our desires, but of the holy purposes of love, truth and righteousness.

You have taken up the burden of the world’s sorrows and suffering; do not seek to carry it by your own strength alone.

Be assured that however great your struggle with your own finitude, the truly important work is not about you.

And take joy in the deep wells of shared meaning and growth that the calling of ministry opens to you.

Thus I charge you on this auspicious day, and welcome you into the community of those whose lives are given to the service of the most high.

May the bright promise of this hour be fulfilled in many years of fruitful ministry.

Bless you, dear one, and all those you will touch in faith for the rest of your days.

-Kendyl

The Reverend Dr. Kendyl Gibbons is the Senior Minister of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Kansas City, MO, the 2015 recipient of the Humanist of the Year Award from the UU Humanist Association, and a beloved mentor and teaching pastor to 26 Unitarian Universalist seminarians across four decades.

Two Sundays ago, I attended St. James Episcopal Cathedral in Chicago. It’s the home of the Episcopal Archdiocese of Chicago, and delivers the full smells-and-bells liturgical worship—so give it a miss if you don’t like incense, kneeling communion, or a sung (Latin) liturgy. From start to finish, modernist entry plaza to soaring cathedral ceiling, the experience is intended to get your attention.

And yet, the thing about well-executed liturgy, be it humble or spectacular, is that it creates a container that’s reliable enough to hold us and predictable enough to fade from view. Because then we are free to go deep into a heart experience as a complement to our head truths.

It is a sign of ritual efficacy, then, that the most searing moment of my Sunday worship experience was not being spritzed with holy water or choked with frankincense; it was hearing the full import of an offhand remark from the priest.

“We remember the promises of baptism,” she intoned, “as we deepen our faith journey in these days—and there are 50 of them; did you know that?— of Easter.”

Me, dreamily: Yes, we remember the . . .

Wait, what!?

(Do Lutherans also observe this? Have I missed a key feature of the church year for the entirety of my life so far? WHY would Easter need to continue for FIFTY DAYS?)

I probably have missed this, friends. Willfully. Joyfully.

Because here’s a fun fact: I don’t want 50 days of Easter.

Not at all. I have a hard time with one day of Easter, quite honestly, between the too-bright promises of the heaven not in keeping with my theology, and the too-sugary substitutes of the secular YAY SPRING alternative. It’s sleight of hand, all of it, and it leaves me nothing for the tricks and reversals of the rest of the season. Candy wrappers and an empty tomb for the long slog through April.

And a slog it has been.

Practice resurrection, instructs a Wendell Berry poem favored by UUs this time of year.

And I have been. But friends, resurrection kind of sucks. It’s not pretty. And we think of it in terms of continuity, but it doesn’t work that way. First, you die. And then things are different. Jesus doesn’t get to live among us anymore. Lazarus ends up exiled from his people. Resurrection is active and demanding, and not a continuation so much as a starting over—one that leaves us holding, even as we begin a new life, the broken or bloody pieces of whatever came before.

In fact, I am pretty sure that practicing resurrection is more work than simply dying.

Endings, however terrible, break over us with the force of a tidal wave. We need do nothing. They just come for us. Reemergence, on the other hand,requires effort. Which asks energy. Which we may not have in those first squinting moments.

Here on earth, a rebirth may look like wiggling a pinky finger and calling it movement. It might mean trudging and calling it hope.

Meanwhile, our monthly worship theme is “Freedom,” and it feels purely incongruous. That word, made of stars and stripes, of watermelon, of soaring birds and open highways, it has crash landed in Chicago in April. Freedom picks itself up, tries to unfold its wings, but finds only gray skies and dampness everywhere. The brown puddles gather on the sidewalks, flow over manhole covers, slosh into the gutters.

One evening, I begin the walk home from the store just as drizzle turns to downpour. I couldn’t have hailed a cab that night with a hundred dollar bill in my hand, much less three soaked bags of groceries. I try anyway, as the rain makes creekbeds of the streets, soaks my hat and hair, and flows, impossibly, from the top of my head to the inside of my coat.

Water runs down the back of my neck and under my shirt and into my boots and I am drenched and miserable to my skin.

To my soul.

It remains unclear, days later, whether this was a low point of my life or merely of my week, but I am quite certain that I require no further weeks of this celebration.

Party over. Goodbye Easter. Take your drizzly and disappointing friends with you.

And take your resurrections as well. You know what the tomb stands for, actually? Certainty. Closure. And above all, rest.

I’m supposed to forsake all those for the neverending vulnerability of It might be so? For the messy ambiguities of living, for the certain heartbreak of loving?

Friends, I have always been a crappy disciple. I betray. I doubt. I’d trade my dreams for a handful of beans every week if the exchange of “possibility” took its friend “ambiguity” with it.

And I don’t want 50 days of Easter because the truth is that I’d cut and run from even one of those days if I could. Whether it’s the holy hopes of Jesus or the humus-centered humanism of Wendell Berry, resurrection asks too much of me. I know what’s under that shiny second chance: obligation as far as the eye can see.

It is, in short, the opposite of freedom.

And there is truth in that. I didn’t know there was a particular label for this gathering of spring days, but a season is a season whether we name it so or not. Easter. Search. Spring. Thirty-something angst. Name them as you will; the fact is that is easier to hail a cab in the Chicago Loop in the rain than to escape from any season prematurely.

And there are so many seasons in our lives, and we may not initially recognize them for what they are. Would that the hardest things we deal with be calendar or weather related. How much easier if the great intractable wrestling match of this spring truly involved the Easter bunny. Indeed, I would prefer to choose my seasons, to hand-pick my struggles.

The truth: things unasked for take hold and wrap their arms around us for a time, and we are helpless.

It is hard. And the sole escape from the work is the tomb, whether we seek it bodily or spiritually. That has always been the alternative to trudging up that hill. Again. In the rain. To painful growth. To the expectations that lead, inevitably, to obligation.

And so, “freedom.”

Ha.

I guess it looks like walking, friends.

Trudging. Dog paddling, if needed, through the puddles.

And then we stop to rest, find that yes, this day too has an end, and believe that someday the season will, too. These must be enough for this moment: the stopping points, and the beginnings that lie just beyond. Enough that they will come. Enough that we will move toward them. Enough that we will keep breathing in the meantime.

For the crappy disciples among us, the freedom may lie in surrender. Not to the tomb, but to this time. To this season. To these 50 days of whatever . . .